I feel as though I’ve always known I was adopted. I remember different moments of coming into awareness of being adopted, but the sense of me-ing displaced, of being from somewhere else, has always been with me. To their credit, my adoptive parents were always honest about my adoption. My early memories are connected to discussions about being adopted. The year leading up to my sister’s adoption was filled with direct discussion and overheard conversations about the process, including visits from state social workers. I recall being interviewed alone by a woman, or perhaps a man who came with a grad student who did the interview, although I do not recall what was asked of me, if indeed this did happen. I learned much later that none of this process of interview and oversight had been followed prior to my private adoption… my sister’s adoption was through the state of Idaho, or a “public adoption,” as I understood it as a child. My private adoption was, in contrast, a sloppier, and apparently cheaper process. Throughout my search I would give up for months, convinced that there was nothing more for me to discover. But what I’ve learned directly from my biological mother and biological father did help anchor me into my own narrative, I found the threads of my own story. Before I came into contact with them, I was left pondering a series of unconnected and yet interrelated facts, struggling to see if there might be meaning within those bits of data. And in wrestling with these fragments of narrative I find a unique, almost absurdist void of meaning that challenges my very notion of selfhood.
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